Advertising in stores, malls, and other out-of-home, public spaces where goods and/or services may be sold or where marketers would like to reach certain audiences (collectively referred to herein as “public locations”) is increasingly becoming a popular choice as more marketers shift their budget allocation away from traditional print and TV. Effective advertisements that deliver relevant messages to the right customers at the right time have a huge potential to influence purchase decisions as well as build long-term brand equity for their advertisers. The use of media devices—e.g., video displays, speakers, etc.—in public locations promises to revolutionize marketing by providing dynamic and captivating content to valuable audiences.
FIG. 1 is a flow diagram that illustrates a system that can be employed to conduct a digital media marketing campaign in public locations. A marketing campaign is any audio and/or visual campaign that includes one or more unit of media content (e.g., a series of audio or video clips containing advertisements for products and services). Marketing campaigns may relate to single products, services, or concepts, or may relate to multiple products, services, or concepts from a manufacturer or provider. An ad buy and content service 101 includes an ad buy service 101a that allows media buyers to work with a vendor, a retailer, or other network operator that owns or operates a media device network 103. The media buyer may plan a marketing campaign with a pre-agreed play commitment based on audience reach, frequency, and relevance 101b. Various campaign reference data 101c, which could include logistics of a campaign, promoted products, network topology and media device characteristics and location information, as well as media content files and content metadata 101e created from content services 101d, is transmitted to a media controller 102 or multiple media controllers.
A typical media controller 102 consists of one or more services to manage the campaign data and media content distribution. For example, a content authoring service 102b may be provided to allow content to be customized to a format that is suitable for players 103a in the media device network 103. A campaign workflow and management service 102a generates network-operator-specific campaign programming/media playlists 102b based on play commitments, content attributes, and a set of business constraints. A playlist is a schedule that provides instructions on which media content to present, as well as the order and/or specific time of presentation. A playlist may contain a single marketing campaign or may contain elements from many different marketing campaigns. The playlists and the associated media files/content are then distributed by downloading or streaming from a content distribution service 102d to a media device network 103 or multiple media device networks. A media device network is comprised of two or more media players that are capable of presenting the marketing campaign to audiences in public locations.
Players 103a in the media device network 103 present campaign media in accordance with the received playlists. Players are designed to communicate with one or more remote controllers and cache whole or partial units of media content in local storage before the media content is played. A media serving and reporting service 103b monitors the presentation of campaign media and produces media playlogs 103c. A playlog identifies the media content that is presented by the corresponding player during a particular time frame. For example, a playlog may be a set of records that are correlated with a player and/or media device network, each record containing a reference that uniquely identifies a presented unit of media content, a time stamp associated with the presentation, a date stamp associated with the presentation, and any other data that may be recorded by the player that pertains to the presentation of the associated unit of media content. The playlogs 103c may be used for various reporting purposes, such as billing, performance monitoring, and proof of play. For example, an advertiser that pays X dollars to have an advertising campaign presented Y times on a retail store chain's media devices at a particular time slot may be entitled to receive a proof-of-play report from the network operator that confirms that such presentation was made.
The playlogs 103c may also be provided to an analytics service 104. The analytics service includes a measurement and optimization service 140a for the purpose of measuring and optimizing the presentation of the marketing campaign. The analytics service may analyze the effectiveness of the campaign and recommend experimental designs and modified playlists for further media optimization based on audience response data as reported by the media device network 103. Common functionalities provided by the analytics service include any marketing science such as (a) market mix analysis, (b) customer segmentation and targeting, and (c) experimental design. The analytics service may measure effectiveness, recommend actions based on audience responses, and optimize what, when and how marketing media content should be served. Because analytics services are typically very specialized, they are conventionally not provided intrinsically. This means that the analytics service 104 is usually an external service, not associated with the controller 102 and provided by a third-party service provider.
The analytics service 104 provides playlist and media recommendations 104b to the ad buy service 101a and the campaign workflow and management service 102a where they are used to improve the efficacy of marketing campaigns. Due to a lack of a widely-accepted industry standard, it is rare that two different media device networks are able to generate the same format of playlogs. In order to allow the analytics service 104 to interact with the media controller 102 for the exchange of campaign schedule heuristics and results, it is therefore often necessary to provide one or more custom adaptors 105 to enable such data exchange.
Although dashed-lines are drawn in FIG. 1 to cluster various components or services for purposes of this description, the clustered components or services are purely conceptual. Depending on how the system is implemented, the system can potentially have different partitioning with different service boundaries. For example, it is common for a party that owns or operates a media device network to implement some basic functionality of content authoring while allowing its partner to create specialized components for more sophisticated content editing. It is also very common for a media device network owner to provide basic reporting, but allow third-party analytics services to be used to assess and model audience and customer responses. It will be appreciated that each component or service in FIG. 1 can be hosted on its own server or share a server with other services. In some embodiments, each media controller 102 resides in a closely monitored network operation center (NOC) and the players reside at venues where media content are played. The media controller and players can communicate with each other over a network, which can be a satellite, a virtual private network, the public Internet, or other network. Communication can be in the form of broadcast multicasting, file transfer, streaming, etc.
To ensure that players 103a in a media device network 103 are indeed fulfilling a presentation commitment, it would be beneficial to validate the network-operator-generated playlogs 103c. The following problems, however, currently exist for the validation of marketing campaigns presented on public space digital media device networks:
1. Potential for fraudulent reports. Media buyers currently rely on network operators operating the digital media players to provide proof-of-play reporting. The playlogs provided by the network operator for billing purposes are potentially subject to fraud or misrepresentation, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In the unintentional case, a network operator creating a programming playlist can loop multiple ads. In some cases, the play-counts for each ad can be calculated up-front and used for billing invoices. However, calculating play-count prior to the presentation of marketing media on players is not necessarily accurate when the players are not be functioning (e.g., during a dark screen due to hardware failure or network outage) or when a campaign is not running as planned due to stock being out, etc. In order to overcome problems associated with pre-calculated play counts, the playlogs from the media players are critical in proving that actual presentation indeed happened. However, even the playlogs do not necessarily guarantee that presentation was indeed accurately recorded. Sometimes during the transmission of playlogs, errors can be introduced due to network package loss and other inherent network quality of service issues.
2. Manual inspection and sampling lacks precision and scalability. In some situations, manual auditing of the presentation of marketing media may be conducted. For example, careful observations by humans of players in all venues can be conducted or, as more commonly done, a sampling approach based on observations performed in a few venues can be extrapolated to estimate the accuracy of a network operator's playlogs. The lack of standard auditing practices for in-store and public space media device networks, however, means that the quality of auditing services provided by third-parties may vary tremendously. In addition, although a manual process may be effective for a small number of physical locations, a manual process is not precise, is more likely to be error-prone, and does not scale well when a campaign spans a large network of stores and other public locations.
3. The lack of granular playlogs. Some digital media devices fundamentally do not have the ability to provide granular level playlogs for each unit of media content played. For example, some media devices serve reports only on a play count or an aggregated basis. In addition, some digital media devices are not sophisticated enough to produce any playlogs. In essence, it is not guaranteed that any media device network to be audited has the capability of providing reliable and accurate playlogs.
4. The difficulty of integrating with an analytics service for measurement and optimization purposes. As previously discussed, in order to allow the analytics service 104 to interact with the media controller 102 for the exchange of campaign schedule heuristics and results, it is often necessary to provide one or more custom adaptors 105 to enable such data exchange. Given the custom nature of such adaptors, and the requirement to generate new adaptors as new playlist formats are generated, it will be appreciated that the approach is ad hoc, time-consuming, and non-scalable.
In light of the foregoing challenges, a need therefore exits for a system that allows the simple, timely, and accurate validation of marketing campaigns presented on media device networks that are located in public locations.